Just some snips from their conversation, which was the second half hour of the show… the first half hour an overview of Slavic Village in Cleveland, caught in the sub prime tsunami.

RICK KARR: There’s a cancer eating away at a neighborhood in Cleveland called Slavic Village: On block after block, homes sit empty, boarded up, stripped bare. But things were different just a few years ago.

BARBARA ANDERSON: There was a time when each and every one of the houses on the neighborhood was up and standing, and looking pristine. The yards were well manicured. You could hear laughter. You could hear neighbors calling out to each other from across the street. At that time, there were a lot of gardens in the backyards, and people were very proud of their gardens, and they would pick the tomatoes, or they’d pick the peppers, and they would share it with neighbors. You would see people sitting on porches, reading newspapers and laughing and talking, listening to their music.

RICK KARR: But that was before the sub-prime mortgage crisis started to destroy Slavic Village in the first half of the decade. Since then, longtime resident

BARBARA ANDERSON: says there have been more than half a dozen foreclosures just on her block. This house went after the man who owned it was admitted to a nursing home .and his wife couldn’t keep up the payments. There used to be a home on this empty lot until it was foreclosed, condemned and leveled. And the family that lived here came home one day to find that a Sheriff’s bailiff had put their possessions out on the street after their bank foreclosed. Anderson, who runs a community organization that’s trying to fight the neighborhood’s decline, says it’s like a horror story.

BARBARA ANDERSON: You could almost see the fangs, just gouging the actual lifeblood out of the neighborhood as more and more houses became boarded up, and more and more houses became to be stripped. So, the house now next door to it, the house on the other side of it, and now those houses began to eat away at other houses. So, each time it looked like one house had actually infected the house next door to it, and it had taken on that same Dracula kind of look. And it was infecting even more houses.

RICK KARR: That infection spread to more than a thousand houses in the neighborhood. At one point last year, there were more foreclosures in Slavic Village’s zip code than in any other in the country.

Honestly it reminds me of the crack cocaine epidemic: Domestic war on the citizenry, by other means.

BTW, Cleveland is one city that filed suit:

RICK KARR: So the City of Cleveland filed a lawsuit earlier this year to recover some of that money and hold Wall Street responsible for the foreclosure crisis. The suit targets twenty-one investment banks and mortgage companies that have foreclosed on thousands of Cleveland homes including Deutsche Bank, which has filed more than four thousand seven hundred and fifty foreclosure actions. Wells Fargo, with more than four thousand and Countrywide and HSBC, which have filed about thirteen hundred each. Cleveland didn’t file suit against these banks because they made the loans in the first place, but rather because they allegedly created the environment that led to a lot of bad loans.

MAYOR JACKSON: Without them, this would not have happened. But for their actions, this would have not occurred.

RICK KARR: Banks were making a lot of money buying and selling mortgages whether the loans were sound or not. The more loans, the more money. So, the suit says, “in order … to keep pace with Wall Street’s burgeoning demand” for new mortgages, the banks pushed for lower lending standards until, “Even borrowers unlikely to meet their obligations [got] loans”. Jackson says the banks had to know that Cleveland would end up paying the price for what they were doing.

On to Greider:

WILLIAM GREIDER:To make the story overly crude, Congress repealed the law against usury. It was done in 1980 by a Democratic Congress, Democratic President. And, of course, the Republicans all piled on and voted for it. And that was the first stroke, only the first of many, in which they stripped away the regulatory laws from the financial system and from banking.

And that allowed the free market modernized gimmicks of one kind or another, all these things we’re now reading about, to flourish. And that’s where we are. I mean, the gatekeepers said to the banking industry and to the financial industry, “We don’t think federal control or regulation is good for you, so we’re, therefore, liberating you to do your own thing.”

BILL MOYERS: So why did they do that in 1980? I mean, there was, of course, the rise of the backlash to regulation from 40 years of Democratic rule-

WILLIAM GREIDER: The-

BILL MOYERS: -there was the rise, the arrival of the conservatives with their free market ideology.

WILLIAM GREIDER: Right, right.

BILL MOYERS: What was the issue?

WILLIAM GREIDER: Well, the driver then, and it was a powerful driver, was inflation. And through the ’70s, for lots of reasons inflation, which tends to undermine the value of financial wealth and money, was out of control. The Federal Reserve had lost control of it, not entirely its fault. But that set up a political climate that said the government is not working and that wasn’t wrong at the moment. Let’s get the government out of the way.

And that was very appealing as framed by Ronald Reagan and other conservatives. But I think it’s fair to say most Democrats yielded to it against whatever their original instincts were because of political necessity. And then the third dimension, maybe the most important, was that you had this very powerful industrial sector, that is banking and finance, that wanted and had pushed for years to get out from under the regulatory controls, limits on interest rates, the law against usury, the merger of commercial banks with investment banks, which had been prohibited in the New Deal because it caused the disaster of 1929.

I can go on and on. But you see the pattern. And the point I keep trying to make to people is that history learned the hard way that you do need prudential controls on industries like banking ’cause they’re so central to everybody’s well being.

hmmm. We have so lacked for bi partisanship… Isn’t there someone running on that fiction? I do believe he played basketball earlier to day in Kuwait, en route to Afghanistan. The other war theatre, soon to hot up.

WILLIAM GREIDER: -it’s a wildly grotesque transaction where the public guarantees the life of these firms, and there isn’t any effort that we know of to say, “And in return, you’re going to behave in the following ways for the next ten years or maybe forever. We’ll pass a law later that spells that out more clearly, but this is our starting demand.” And I suppose they would say, “Well, we don’t have time to do that. This is a crisis, blah, blah, blah.” I don’t buy that. I think that’s a way to avoid those questions is not even mention them.

BILL MOYERS: You have been writing for a long time now that America’s moving toward a corporate state. If we become one, can we exercise the self-correcting faculty that prevents us from hitting the iceberg out there?

WILLIAM GREIDER: One of the reasons I think politics is going to change fairly dramatically is that the Federal Reserve, accompanied by the Treasury Department and I think will be accompanied by the Congress, has crossed a very dangerous line in their bailout. They have essentially said, “We will put money on the table, taxpayers’ money on the table, for any financial institution or business that is too big to fail.” That is, if it fails, it’ll send dangerous ripples through the economy.

And we’ve got a list now of maybe 30, 40, depending on how you count them, that we will be there to save you. I regard that as profoundly dangerous for the American Republic because once you cross that line and you have this special club that’s privileged, that has benefits from government that nobody else can get, where do you stop it?

I mean, if I were running a big manufacturing company, I would have quickly run out and buy a subsidiary that’s a bank or a financial firm that looks like a bank. And I would then try to get myself on that list. Who wouldn’t? What’s going on right now it’s gotten a little attention – the union SEIU is fighting it, is these private equity firms, which are huge money pots of investors that take over and change corporations and come away with huge profits. The private equity firms are trying to buy into the banks and financial firms.

BILL MOYERS: And what would that mean?

WILLIAM GREIDER: That would mean that this private unregulated equity fund would be participating behind the door, so to speak, in the management of our regulated banks. But it would also, in a pinch, if it’s big enough, maybe have a tap into that federal guarantee that if you’re too big to fail, we’ll be there for you.

Well, not too tough to read there is much joy to come. Maybe elected members of congress could just take the cash and stay home. Let their corporate masters detail a management contingent to sit in those chairs.

What would be different?

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And there is this from Greider… I was reminded last night, as I listened, that a anti Iraq War speech from Byrd in congress in 2005 was entitled: Come Home America:

WILLIAM GREIDER: We have an opening in this crisis for, this is really going to sound grandiose. We have an opening in this crisis for a deep transformation in American politics. I don’t say it happens this year, next year, or it’s going to take a number of years. But we are in the shock of reality. And people get it everywhere and see the blood in the streets. And you tell them how this worked and who did what to whom, and that’s a basis for a new politics.

But it requires people – this is the hard part – to get out of their sort of passive resignation to, “Well, we follow the Democrats” or “we follow the Republicans” or “we let this group or that group tell us how to think” and engage among themselves in a much more serious role as citizens. And when, as they do that, they have to be willing to punish the political powers, in smart ways or crude ways, however they can, first, to get a place in the debate. But, secondly, to force the changing values of the system.

And I, this may be wishful, but I think in the next year, two years, five years, you’re going to see both political parties floundering. What do we believe about all this stuff? We’ve told folks this, you know, lovely story for 20, 25 years about the magic of the marketplace. Do we still want to kind of prop that up? That’s where they are now. They’re still trying to prop up the marketplace vision and make it work again. It’s over.

I think events will demonstrate that. So if they’re not willing to change then we need to change the politicians. And that’s all a bloody process and doesn’t happen quickly. But that’s why I’m optimistic.

BILL MOYERS: Bill Greider we look forward to your new book, the title of it will be-

LOL I googled for a conventional oven recipe for roast chicken the other night and come up with a Bitten NYT blogs recipe… I had forgotten that column entirely…

personally I think the produce business has been under assault. Tomato growers got screwed, pretty obviously… but i also read that FDA inspectors, over a couple of decades, went from 50K to around 5k today.

Practically living on fresh-made salsa at the moment. Tossed the remainder of this week’s batch on a couple of over-hard eggs for brunch. Tomorrow I’m doing some nachos with Megalo-Mart chicken on top (mr_xeno insisted on buying a bag of the frozen stuff that’s almost as big as a truck tire), but the tomatoes ‘n jalapeno will come from the Co-op, where they can be counted on to have a little flavor, at least. Oh, and white onions. Walla Wallas, if I can afford them. Nothing’s more delicious in fresh salsa than sweet white onions.

…If Obama cannot even make a show or a pretense of a defense of people’s rights when he is not the president, I for one am vastly fearful of what he is capable of doing when/if he is the president!

Here is a classic, textbook case of a man simply and purely hungry for power and willing to do anything to get to it; a man who is beholden to the same exact lobbies that control the Republicans, the Congress and the Executive branch and a man who does not shy away from curtailing, in broad daylight, people’s rights and safety from arbitrary government search and seizure.

What more proof does anybody need to conclude that Obama is just as bad and harmful for the well being of the Americans (and others) as is McCain or Bush? Your vote for one or the other makes no difference. Voting for either is the same as throwing your voting ballot in the toilet. Political hacks that throw away people’s rights and their protections against arbitrary governance do not deserve to be elected at all… — Reza Fiyouzat, 7/14/08

The State of Ohio, in Feb 2002, passed H.B. No. 386 (warning PDF). In April of 2002 Cleveland tried to override (?) this by passing a predatory lending ordinance (warning PDF). After, what appears to be (googling) a long court fight, in 2006 the Ohio Supreme Court found the Cleveland ordinance unconstitutional.

After this crap, the lending institutions should be forced to swallow the losses. Instead, the FED is bailing their asses out. Ya catch the SEC shit with naked shorts ? The grift to end all grifts. LOL.

Don’t get me started on the hideous “strawberries” grown in California and other locales for American consumption year-round… basically a tasteless white core wrapped in 2 millimeters of red that only has a nonspecific “berry” taste. It’s always a revelation when you serve a child an actual local strawberry that’s in season.

well, I guess the good news is the soul actually outlives the physical body…..Looking at it ‘scientifically,’…all the rage with such progressed humans whom have learned all the necessary lessons…and are beyond questioning,…energy does not die…I believe that energy applies to intagible thought, both rage hope and love…

Hmmm, “Ender” just got a chill on peeder’s social expermient….I may be a failure on this earth….but some benevolent force had me check in to the haps on the spider web and my faith in something kind was reinforced with ender meeting ender’s own seeming hatred with some blogger named voodou hand [sic?]

Ender resorted to denial when faced with a picture of misery inflicted on a helpless and quite naked to the world child…and claimed it to be “child porn”…..there is evil ender….and humans are for some bewildering reason…sadly able to manifest it…..

Yet Ender, peeder, kraant, pinche….et al…… had no problem with a dog sticking it’s maw in a woman’s insides…….

I eat local strawberries in spring and summer. I also let them ripen at room temperature (unless we are in some damned heat wave) til they are almost over the edge. Really wonderful. Mostly Driscoll strawberries, I buy them by the 5 lb clamshell. I get those from Safeway at very reasonable prices… usually around 6. or so for the clamshell

In winter my market carries berries from S and C America… mostly.

Last winter I was ordering 4 and 5 lbs of clementines, incredibly good. moiv told them were fantastic down in TX, so maybe just a stellar year

One of my neighbors used to frequently visit at an organic farm north of here… and bring baskets back, a selection. I always found things tasteless. “Organic” depends on the farmer… and decades ago people knew that if the Ca ag valley can produce 4 and 5 crops a year, that does not mean it should do that.

2001 I was dying as the fruit was so divine… peaches were fantastic, plums… all of it. I asked my neighborhood market what was up… they are three Greco Italians, who certainly know good fruit and produce… one of them told me, the prices were low and farmers were leaving their fruit on the trees and vines longer. LOL TRULY “vine ripened”.

Well, Marisa, I won’t do Brinn mail, but I’ll let you know when I’m there, I’m sure there’s a way we could work around the Brinn mail…..

Thinking of Brinn/Technological ‘wonders of the world’, there are some really interesting articles on the Truthout archives re how the wonders of technology are really fucking us and the sweet Honeybees up…

Wonder why Gore, the media in Sly Con Valley, and environs, as $Green as they are, aren’t saying a word about it………

i made lebanese rice tonight. quartered local tomatoes, boiler onions, local bell peppers and local goose neck squash skewered, and broiled, over pecan coals to go with it. i also ate two experimental dill pickles i fermented last week. got the info here.

we don’t cook like we used to, at least not now, its damned hot. mostly cut things up, but still manage to drink like fish.

filed under sad songs, from the last thread. i think i forgot to refresh.

but isn’t it good news minister obama intends to fully fund the new U.S. social safety net?

Well, the night falls through the mission door
You get a cot with a blanket, don’t you spit on the floor
And Sister Theresa, she’s friends with the Lord
So no smokin’ in bed, no sleepin’ late in the morning

And it’s hands on the Bible and tears in your eyes
Kneel on the corner, pray for more wine
Well it’s beans and it’s bread, it’s a small price to pay
To hold hands and go dancing
Hands and go dancing
Hands and go dancing
On the old Devil’s grave

Im going to try a big fat peach I just got at the supermarket. It bragged “extreme juiciness” or some such thing on the sign. Plums are beckoning lately. There have been so many summers of bad fruit, I think I gave up entirely last summer.

Those strawberries that taste like straw, they are horrid, NYCO. You live Upstate, dont you? Local strawberries around for the picking?

Agree the Clementines were great this year. Got me back to fruit, Marisa. I think someone put one in my Christmas stocking… Then I was off buying bags.

4, mcat, my recipe for oven-roasted chicken – I put fresh herbs (thyme, rosemary, oregano) under the breast skin and in the cavity, stuff a peeled and halved onion in there, rub some olive oil (or my preference, pumpkin seed oil) over the bird, sprinkle salt and pepper and maybe some paprika or herbes de Provence on top, squeeze a half lemon over the whole thing and plug the cavity with it, and it’s good to go. I roast it at 375 until nicely browned, usually 1.5-2 hours for a 6-7 lb bird. When I remove it from the oven and put it on the platter, I squeeze the remaining half lemon over it.

Sometimes when I need a double shot of “Mediterranean”, I add sliced cloves of garlic under the breast skin and in the cavity.

5, Madman: the rosemary-skewer thing, though it sounds intriguing, and kind of romantic (conjuring up visions of all those Greek and Provencal shepherds out there in the wilderness grilling bits of their flock on fragrant shrubbery) is in practice a pain-in-the-ass and a waste of good rosemary. You can get the same flavor by chopping up a fraction of that quantity of rosemary and adding it to a marinade in which the lamb can bask for a couple of hours.

re: strawberries: there’s a wonderful strawberry farm near us, so we pig out on perfectly ripe berries when they’re in season. The season ended this week. Last weekend we had a big party at our place to celebrate a few nice things that had transpired, and we did it up large with champagne and the last of the strawberries. Here’s the photo we sent to our friends who couldn’t be there.

As shown in the pic, the drink of the day was a Kir Royale -champagne with a dash of cassis, garnished with a strawberry. It was cheap champagne, Korbel, but with the embellishments it was fantastic.

The strawberries were right on the edge of overripeness – almost melting. The next day would have been too late. Gather ye ripe strawberries while ye may… etc.

The Obama photos are cracking me up. They won’t seem to publish almost any single photos of him with white soldiers (especially white male soldiers), only black men and women. How the media does its little numbers.

#29, most of the group photos are mixed of course but have the whites more in the background. The single shots have been everything but white men (so far). I’ll keep scanning but so far a noticeable pattern has emerged in what i’ve seen.

Makes me wish I had gone upstate to my boyfriend’s parents and indulged in some berries. They’re surrounded by family farms. This is the time and that is the place, or was, I guess.

I have, instead, sentenced myself to a summer in the city doing hard (well, not so hard, but tedious and longterm) labor in my apt, tethered to a project of vanquishing the alarming sprawl of my stuff, in a scarily slow fashion. It’s deep excavation and much overdue.

Going thru mail I see I was offered a “classic” Sierra Club rucksack and a Nature Conservancy umbrella (with a heron on it!) for a small membership fee. I have no idea how old the offer is, since they dont date the letters, no postmark. But I can say the SC offer is no farther back than 2007 since there is a letter asking Nancy and Harry to stop doing something bad or start doing something good. Cant remember. I crossed my fingers, signed, donated and sent.

And that’s only from the top layers. And just the mail part of the mess. Ugh. I am not the right soldier for this fight!

However, I must soldier on. To that end, I have posted a large picture of Langley Collyer on my door, to keep myself from going AWOL until achieving at least moderate success.

As I went in search of the legendary Collyers, I came upon some tips for clutter control. Might check it out… later. (lol) The 4 bins technique is very popular these days, Ive noticed.

re checking out Ender (sorry for the delayed response, it’s that kind of day on this end) the pertinent commentary is on a peeder salt pontification from a few days ago, and the ‘antagonist’ is voodouhand (earlier I mistakenly spelled it in two words) perhaps I’m totally mistaken, but I got a sense that the posts really sent a shudder through ender who immediately gave two 99 ratings and requested peeder’s assistance.

I don’t wish ender any fear, but he throws out some incredibly carelessly vicious thoughts that seem to have come back in his face and momentarily left him at a loss for words…whatever is going on in his head currently about it, I doubt will come much to the surface…

Strawberries….

You’re in the right place to grow some Sequoia strawberries, which will put out at least two crops, are pretty partial shade tolerant and easy to grow (they spread prolifically via runners),…just my opinion, but I think they’re delicious too!

How did catnip’s move go? I hope she’s doing fine…Cheesecake with Blueberries!

26 – thanx! You should have been here. The scene was so gorgeous I had to take a picture – Still Life with Kir Royale.

I love those old Dutch paintings with fruit, cheese and haunches of meat strewn casually around glasses of wine. Sometimes they’d throw a fish in there too, and/or a dead gamebird. Party on!

Yes, I agree about the Korbel additives. A dash of cassis or Chambord, anything on the sweet side, makes all the difference.

I love expensive champagne – on the rare occasions when I can get it – but as Frank Prial of the NYT wrote many years ago, a $50 bottle of wine is not necessarily 5 times better than a $10 bottle of wine.

28, bay – I’ll try the orange idea – sounds delish! It works for duck, why not chicken and turkey? But do the orange halves have to be peeled? I would think all the lovely oils in the peels would be nice. Anyway it works for my lemony chicken.

all your recipes be mine!!!!!!

Hey, feel free! Recipes are like story plots – there are no truly original ones. I’m sure I ripped mine off of other people.

Aboutt roast chicken or turkey: the great thing is that it’s unfussy – once you put it in the oven, it stays there, like a big pot of baked beans, until it’s done. You shouldn’t be dragging it out all the time and basting it and turning it over and otherwise harassing it. There are so many wildly complicated recipes out there – I really don’t understand why.

prolly not. shouldnt make much difference. the lovely oil in the peel wouldn’t be an unwecome addition i wouldnt think but i have no experience with it, ive always peeled. i borrowed the technique from a woman, from arkansas and she peeled. she was scots irish, loved rich foods (go figure) an amazing cook in the limited southern style and made a thanksgiving dinner i certainly won’t forget. it was one of the tricks she used roasting her turkey.

i’m much more into roasting chickens, usually about once every month. something magical about chicken fat, several minutes out of the oven.

well what drove up teh price of CA wine, really, was mortgages… LOL… wineries that changed hands, after not for 60+ years, new wineries built at huge ego driven investment. And some smaller wineries with very good wine. sigh……………..

So yeah that 50 bucks is not 5 x better than a 10 dollar wine.

So true.

I am close to D&M Liquors… they specialise in champagne and fine liqueurs… they ship too.

34, Mcat, pork loin roast – I don’t usually do pork roasts, but here’s my thought – I’m a big paprika fan (must be a Hungarian past life or something) and I use it all the time with pork. I suggest mixing a few tablespoons of paprika with about 1/4 cup of olive oil, a few cloves of crushed garlic, a little celery salt if you have it (a real retro 1960s ingredient but it works well for a lot of things) and whatever other spices suit your taste. Then rub it all over the roast and put it in the oven at 350 for, I’m guessing, about an hour and a half. Turn the oven down and cook longer if it looks like the coating is burning. I like scorched garlic, but some don’t.

Ideally this would be served with boiled potatoes and a bottle of white Hungarian wine with an unpronounceable name.

41. Oh yeah, they seem like my kind of people. Thanks for the link. I love this:

On beer

I believe it’s required by law that you carry Budweiser. I’m not sure. Homeland Security would probably be upset if we didn’t.

On closing early New Year’s Eve

We’ve found that business is relatively slow between 10 and midnight, and the people who come after midnight you definitely don’t want to deal with.

On liquor stories

There was the time when a young woman ran in, grabbed a bottle of Cristal out of our refrigerator and ran out. I ran out after her and went to the car that she jumped into and tried to pull it out and she shouted to her boyfriend, “Get the 9 millimeter. Clock him.”

On getting a taste for Champagne

I remember the first bottle. It was in Santa Cruz. It was a Christmas present to my wife from the owner of the bookstore where she was working. It was a $75 bottle of Mumm Cordon Rouge. That was Christmas 1976. A lightbulb moment.

Wow, that must have been a great bookstore.

I hope we all have these “lightbulb moments” about enjoying life, even in the midst of all this political crap.

seems kraant’s disturbed about my earlier comment, begging ignorance…..I would point to the DonkeyKong “Apotheosis of peeder” diary that was at the very top of the list for a few days until a few hours ago, which kraant proclaimed superb writing, but it’s disappeared off the front page……

Perhaps Im just ignorant and don’t appreciate the true intellectual genius behind the story…particularly the blather about peeder transforming into some sort of all knowing divinity of sorts….

LOL…. I wonder if went over to PffterPoofters if I could make sense of “stuff” over there. Maybe after I run the washer a few times tonight, launder some loads.

😉

***********

43

yeah they are great guys… They used to stay open later, there ws a great little restaurant across the street from them, The Hillcrest. There had been a bar and some sort of food service there from speakeasy days on. I loved it, as it got everyone. From Pacific Heights matrons, for lunch, to old pensioners on the stools at teh back bar for shots of cheaper whiskies or cheap vermouth… to all manner of denizens, gay straight and in between…

The owner of the apt building, that they were the commerical enterprise on the ground floor, yanked their lease… so the wife could put in a T Shirt Shop. Omigod… well that became yet another coffee place when teh street had an outcry…

But the upshot was DandM told me with the Hillcrest closed they were down over a thousand bucks a night, from traffic picking up wine or whatever to take home after dinner.

Blew my mind. 30+ thousand a month, they do big business, but still… money out the door.

well if you read the ‘diary’ I referred to save plenty of that water for a nice long, warm bath afterwards, it was truly nasty. Can’t imagine a woman writing a similar story with a man and dog that would get her anything but righteous disgust, versus superb writing…

It gets funnier, now I’ve promoted the story….I guess as long as Susan doesn’t acknowledge the prominent place the story took, or the males she pals with applauding it, the reality doesn’t exist…until some evil female promotes it by expressing disgust with it….sweet….

Sherwood said he was granted full access to the candidate, and was permitted by chief strategist David Axelrod to ask any question he desired—an opportunity the reporter used to lob the easiest softballs at Obama yet, ranging from how happy he felt when he met his wife to what songs are currently on his iPod playlist. Sherwood was also fearless in his effort to paint the candidate as someone who is “surprisingly down to earth,” a phrase that is used a total of 26 times throughout the feature.

“If we were going to get the story we wanted, it was my responsibility as a journalist to ask the really tough questions to his two young daughters,” said Sherwood, who grilled Malia and Sasha Obama, 9 and 7, about whether they were “proud of [their] daddy.” “I also had to capitalize on every opportunity to compare the story of Obama’s upbringing and rise to power to that of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s and John F. Kennedy’s, no matter how suspect those parallels really are.”

I read every word of it, always good to know what the presumeably successful techy wizards, who seem to be some of the few still hanging on to their shirts lately (which is why no one ever hears about the truly destructive side of technology), find acceptable; especially when one has to consistently deal with their ilk in order to pay their own bills and keep a roof over their heads.

If that makes me momentarily “wallowing in mud,” as Susan so defensively put it, so be it…

I’m still betting that Hillary becomes vice, we’ll have our Black and Female, and will never ever ever experience such bad things as poverty, racism and misogyny ever again, and if anyone says so they’re just a whiner and a loser or worse a terrorist and a threat to the nation and should be locked up. Jane Harmon is busy as beee bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz sponsoring legislation that will make it so………

Martin Luther King would turn in his grave at the cold mean $houlder Obama and his buds have given to the ghastly housing situation in Chicago….not to mention FISA and likely Iran right around the corner.

54
Just looked at the wire…same old murky shit, I can barely stand to read up on any of it anymore

Thinking about what you wrote about LBJ the other day, and yeah despite Viet Nam, it seems he may have been one of the last that did anything good, including having the guts to decline from running because he didn’t feel capable of solving the Viet Nam situation.

I wish one politician would go in front of the public be truly honest, and step down from the position stating that DC has been too corrupted for the right thing to be done about anything right now, because that seems to be the reality.

Much of the US loves it’s bullies though, reminds me of a study I read about once that showed that those who were the most vociferous about being right were wrong far more times than those who admitted uncertainty and an unwillingness to just blindly proclaim an answer to something. There doesn’t seem to be any foresight at all anymore, no time allowed for thought, and the blinding speed of technology is just making it hideously worse.

With reporting deadlines looming, congressional officers have issued revised guidelines that ease some of the lobbying disclosure requirements enacted last year.

The revised guidance, issued by the Clerk of the House and Secretary of the Senate, relaxed the rules for disclosure of lobbyist contributions to parties at this summer’s Democratic and Republican national conventions, among other changes.

Some experts criticized the changes as backsliding, but leaders of outside watchdog groups said Democratic leaders had “reached out” to vet the revisions in advance of their release.

Republican leaders were quick to distance themselves from the revisions.

“We were not consulted on this matter and the Democrats took this action on their own,” said Kevin Smith, a spokesman for Minority Leader John A. Boehner , R-Ohio.

Smith declined to comment on the substance of the changes, saying that Boehner’s staff first learned of them early Friday and was still working through them.

“These revisions were an attempt to address legitimate concerns. The offices of the House Clerk and Secretary of the Senate have said they will continue to revise as needed, so if these prove to be too narrow, we will change them,” the spokesman said.

House and Senate ethics guidelines for members attending convention-related events have not changed, a House ethics panel aide said. Lawmakers are still responsible for following the guidelines issued by their respective chambers.

Natalie Ravitz, a spokeswoman for Ethics Chairwoman Barbara Boxer , D-Calif., referred inquiries to the Secretary of the Senate, saying that the ethics panel was not involved in the change.

The disclosure changes, issued late July 16, exempt a lobbyist from reporting spending for an event listing a lawmaker as “attendee” or “special invitee,” as opposed to the honored guest.

The new guidelines also exempt from disclosure money a lobbyist raises for a charity that is not created or controlled by a lawmaker by sponsoring an event that names a lawmaker as an “honorary co-host.

“The purpose of the event is to raise funds for [charity], not to honor or recognize” the lawmaker, according to the guidance.

Oh, okay then … I’m sure that no one will take the opportunity to politic while they’re working so hard for “charity”.

women shuffled to the altar, cut up their credit cards and placed them near his feet.

“If we want to have victory, we have to come out of financial bondage,” the Rev. John K. Jenkins of First Baptist Church of Glenarden shouted during a recent sermon.

Ordinarily Jenkins’s sermons are about spiritual freedom and ridding one’s self of sin. But his message has taken a different turn lately — one that preaches the dangers of overspending and debt.

The sermons are not unusual. With the country on the cusp of a recession and many people burdened by the mortgage foreclosure crisis, skyrocketing gas prices and rising grocery bills, religious leaders across the Washington region are increasingly ministering to their members about financial responsibility, encouraging them to control their spending.

“We tell our members, don’t buy dresses and shoes, take trips, all on credit,” Jenkins said in an interview. “It’s killing us.”

Churches are going a step further by providing financial counseling and pointing people to local and state programs that help with finances.

McLean Bible Church in Northern Virginia offers classes on how to handle money according to Biblical principles. And last month, St. Martin’s Catholic Church in Gaithersburg hosted a foreclosure prevention workshop to help those in danger of losing their homes.

LEAH DAUGHTRY SLIPPED OFF HER STILETTO-HEEL SHOES at the House of the Lord Church in Brooklyn, stepped from a pastor’s chair to the pulpit and shouted, “I am on the rise!” She wore a long black tunic with gold buttons that ran from her high collar almost to the carpet. Her graying hair was shorn tight to her dark brown scalp. She always preaches in bare feet in order to “de-self,” she had told me, and to let God’s spirit and words rush through her unimpeded. “I am on the rise!” she erupted again.

Dancing down front, in an aisle between pews, was a woman in an elaborate dress with a lace corsage whose breast cancer had been eradicated, Daughtry had said, through the prayers of her church sisters: “The eggheads will say her chemotherapy worked, but everyone who uses chemotherapy isn’t cured.”

:::snip:::

African-American, with little copper-rimmed glasses adorning an unlined round face, Daughtry is a part-time preacher and full-time political operative. She serves as chief of staff to Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee. In the spring of last year, Dean appointed her chief executive of the party’s convention; though she will now be collaborating with Barack Obama’s team, she is in charge of orchestrating the event next month in Denver — of making sure that everything runs right, that buses have enough slots to park in, that people have enough hotel rooms to sleep in and that the millions watching the convention on TV are captivated and inspired by the four-day-long show.

:::snip:::

In her positions as Dean’s top aid and the convention’s top official, Daughtry, who is 44 years old, is leading the Democratic Party’s new mission to make religious believers — particularly ardent Christian believers — view the party and its candidates as receptive to, and often impelled by, the dictates of faith. She sparked this crusade, both to transfigure the party’s image as predominantly secular and to take enough votes from the Republicans to win this year’s presidential election…

:::snip:::

Behind her as she preached, a simple wooden cross hung on a brick wall in the vaulted and sizable sanctuary of the church, which is headed by her father, Herbert Daughtry. A prison convert who served time in his early 20s for armed robbery and passing bad checks, Herbert Daughtry — whose father founded the church and whose grandfather and great-grandfather were also ministers — became the church’s pastor 50 years ago, and today Leah was delivering the sermon as part of an anniversary celebration. Below the sanctuary, in the fellowship hall, a banner for slavery reparations proclaimed, “They Owe Us.”…

i support reparations. its a sensible way to spend government funds and would benefit americans directly, not corps, and i support that. its also a given that reparations offends a majority of those southern anglo votes howard covets and many anglo-americans in general.

what really offends me about that piece is the following:

…a woman in an elaborate dress with a lace corsage whose breast cancer had been eradicated, Daughtry had said, through the prayers of her church sisters: “The eggheads will say her chemotherapy worked, but everyone who uses chemotherapy isn’t cured.”

i’m a cancer survivor, soon to be seven years. being active in peer support i’ve come to know many other cancer patients who’d received a similar dx as mine, often a similar treatment. i know from my own experiences that not everyone who uses prayer is cured. the “egghead” statement is laughable, and is really just egg revealed all over ms daughtry’s face.

by the way i don’t recall spending anytime in prayer at all, proof it isn’t a requirement in one instance. if faced with another malignancy? i’ll side with eggheads once again.

now, since it is sunday my prayer is this: please spare us, oh lord, the finger-wagging jesus-saves lectures of your tru believers, as well as your politicians who have god on their side. i’m not in the goddamn mission praying for meal and cot just yet.

[C]ity officials were having a difficult time judging the size of the expected crowd. The local Tagesspiegel newspaper quoted one as predicting “between 10,000 and a million.” In a sign that they are expecting a big turnout regardless, the city plans erect video monitors for those who cannot get close enough to see the candidate.

As expected, several German politicians criticized the location because of the historic overtones of the militarist monument. The Victory Column “is dedicated to victories over our neighbors, who today are our European friends and allies,” said Andreas Schockenhoff, a leading member of Mrs. Merkel’s conservative party, according to the local Berliner Zeitung. “I consider it to be an unhappy symbolism.”

“I think it’s a less-than-perfect venue,” said Michael Cullen, an American building historian based in Berlin, who has written extensively about the Reichstag, the Brandenburg Gate and other Berlin landmarks. “It doesn’t connote anything but Prussian military prowess and that’s not a great symbol.”

The Siegessäule is one of Berlin’s most recognizable landmarks, a monument to Prussian war victories that now acts as a gathering place during public events like the parade on Berlin’s gay pride day, known as Christopher Street Day. Gates open at 4 p.m.

F.I.A. has also financed the faith outreach of state parties, sometimes in striking ways. In Alabama, the pro-life party chairman was given F.I.A. money to publish a “Faith and Values Voters Guide” in local newspapers just before Election Day in 2006. The 12-page insert provided the religious narratives of statewide Democratic candidates — “I was richly blessed in my life with parents who raised me in a Christian home. . . .” — and concluded with a Democratic “covenant for the future.” The covenant pledged to “require public schools to offer Bible literacy as part of their curriculum” and made at least two vows that run counter to positions of the national party: to “pass a constitutional amendment confirming that all life is a gift from God and should be protected; and that life begins at conception” and to “defeat any efforts to redefine marriage or provide the benefits of marriage to a same-sex union.”

Daughtry sounded surprised when I read her these vows. Though she is a biblical literalist who sees no problem with teaching creation theory side by side with evolution — “For me, the Bible is history” — she, following the teaching of her father’s church, is also pro-choice. “God allows us to choose in the biggest matter,” she said, “whether to accept Him in our lives. How then can we take away choice on other profound issues? We don’t believe the government should interfere.” Hearing Alabama’s covenant, she said right away that F.I.A. has not vetted everything the state parties have done with its money. Then she leaned heavily on the poles of the big tent: “The wonderful thing about the Democratic Party is that we have room for all kinds of opinions.”

wonderful. glad the party is standing up for women’s reproductive rights in alabama. oh wait! it appears that they’re not.

Reading the NYT mag on Duaghtry… I wish them luck (said with derision)… and I don’t think things like the doings of the “Pro Life” head of the Faith in Action in AL is the least bit unplanned (iow, screw ms daughtry, the DP, and her cons):

F.I.A. has also financed the faith outreach of state parties, sometimes in striking ways. In Alabama, the pro-life party chairman was given F.I.A. money to publish a “Faith and Values Voters Guide” in local newspapers just before Election Day in 2006. The 12-page insert provided the religious narratives of statewide Democratic candidates — “I was richly blessed in my life with parents who raised me in a Christian home. . . .” — and concluded with a Democratic “covenant for the future.” The covenant pledged to “require public schools to offer Bible literacy as part of their curriculum” and made at least two vows that run counter to positions of the national party: to “pass a constitutional amendment confirming that all life is a gift from God and should be protected; and that life begins at conception” and to “defeat any efforts to redefine marriage or provide the benefits of marriage to a same-sex union.”

Daughtry sounded surprised when I read her these vows. Though she is a biblical literalist who sees no problem with teaching creation theory side by side with evolution — “For me, the Bible is history” — she, following the teaching of her father’s church, is also pro-choice. “God allows us to choose in the biggest matter,” she said, “whether to accept Him in our lives. How then can we take away choice on other profound issues? We don’t believe the government should interfere.” Hearing Alabama’s covenant, she said right away that F.I.A. has not vetted everything the state parties have done with its money. Then she leaned heavily on the poles of the big tent: “The wonderful thing about the Democratic Party is that we have room for all kinds of opinions.”

should’ve posted it a while ago…but alas..I’m slow……….the Mr. Fish cartoon – Sam the sworded Bully offering an out from drowning in the Hell Sam has aided and abetted [sic]..(fuckin Brits and their peculiar spelling rules and exceptions, as many exceptions as there are rules)……was certainly apropos of DC at large…..

ridin the goat….the scapegoat…..

THe creepy thang is there are plenty fallin through the cracks who’d love to take over those reins….

Put your faith in no Man (or Woman)…

Empathy will in fact ‘rule’…..it takes far more to be kind than hateful…………..

and yeah I did mean it melvin, many many hugs to you in your momentary desolation, even though there were some devil in the detail grammatical errors and circumstances…it was most certainly…from the gut….yes hugs to you Hon….

don’t know why it didn’t occur to me that she had a website I could go check to see how she was, guess I’m just truly reluctant to get used to checking twenty bazillion websites…..

Catnip, if you’re checking in occasionally, put an address on there if you’re able without revealing too much (Catnip wrote that she’s a bit stretched right now and may need to move yet again for her own peace of mind), I could send a small bit……I know posting an address could be more difficult/stressful than it sounds due to very real privacy concerns, …but many of us still won’t do paypal….

About six-in-ten (61%) white evangelicals favor McCain while 25% support Obama. McCain’s 36-point advantage among this group is comparable to Bush’s lead in 2000 but smaller than Bush’s 43-point lead in 2004. Nonetheless,

Obama has made no significant gains among this important constituency.The number of white evangelicals who say they would vote for Obama (25%) is about the same as the number who supported the Democratic presidential candidates in June 2004 (26%) and June 2000 (28%).

White evangelicals are more undecided today than they were at this point in the previous two presidential elections. More than one-in-ten (12%) white evangelicals say they do not know who they would vote for if the election was held today.

The front lines are elsewhere today, in a struggle against a different enemy. We don’t know whether jihadism will turn out to be a less or more formidable foe than Communism. But at least Obama can say what Kennedy did not live to see: that just over a quarter-century after Kennedy spoke, after much controversy, and despite many mistakes, and thanks to considerable sacrifice, the world of freedom could take sober satisfaction in a remarkable victory.

marisa, things actually got worse there after the move but seem to have settled down, somewhat, now. Hard to tell if it will last or not. I, too, hope she can find a rural setting to live in. It’s sorely needed.

Surely, one thing that’s sorely missing from the ObamaAsMovementMan frenzy is what Obama claimed he never has – DOUBT.

Logan: “Do you have any doubts?”

Obama: “Never.”

Sounds just a tad… what’s the word? Messianic?

I dont think he considers policy when he utters this word “never” with such unflappable confidence. I think he considers himself.

Doubt is fundamental to intelligently grappling with a serious issue in a serious way. To say he has no doubt, over something so volatile and deeply difficult as improving the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and maintaining our security, is indicative of shallow, not deep waters. It’s disturbing, not reassuring.

But then, why should he have any doubts (about himself as winner) when he’s been vaulted to the heavens by the adoring masses on little more than the heavens aligned so favorably for his dazzling performance? As for policy, so far it looks like he’ll get what’s on the boilerplate from garden variety DC chefs (Council on Foreign Relations, Hagel, et al) and serve it up with his majik touch as something breathtakingly, groundbreakingly brilliant, that he alone could author/offer.

It’s the juxtaposition, stupid!

The scary thing is that Bush, his coterie, and the Rs, serving up the last 8 years as Supreme Fuck-Ups, have made it all too easy for someone with a fine image (for these times) to look incredibly fresh and fantastic and brilliant by contrast.

Of course he is better than Bush or McCain. Playing the popular rename McCain game, I can easily crown McCain as McLame, and McLamer still with each passing day on the stump. And of course, his policies are largely McInSane.

When I criticize Obama harshly, it is not just directed at him and some of his positions, but also at the frenzied masses who, like moths, swarm in mindless adulation to his klieg-lit screen. Not healthy, that conglomeration. Yeah, its great that we have a young man, an articulate man, a black man in this place. I dig that. But he isn’t all that/we need.

(With moths in mind: Don’t moths mistake the light for what they need, foolishly flinging themselves against it, again and again, ultimately hurting themselves in the process?)

Fuzzy wads of meat that fly and squish, without the sleek chitin of the rest of their kin or the usefulness of the fuzzy bees, humming honey-givers. They have a solidness to their beings that other insects lack, and they use this to batter their bodies against the glass of Man, whether in lamps or in windows in front of lamps.

That’s the other problem; they’re very, very stupid. They beat and beat and beat until they are near the light, and then die of wounds or thirst, corpses collecting in the lamp’s bowl.

The time between attack and death cannot be ignored; the moth’s moving shadow darkens the room, its death-flutterings in the glass bowl are amplified. It can be saved, but it will take an hour to turn out all the lights and coax it out without squashing it accidentally in the cardboard used as a fan. To save every moth would take all one’s time, yet it is disquieting to sit and read in light that passes through a dying moth. I look forward to its death, the end of motion, then catch myself in wishing it dead and feel guilt.

[Lol. Just for the record, I dont share the above author’s moth hatred. One flew in the kitchen the other night and began relentlessly beating itself against the ceiling bulb. Out of sympathy, I turned out the light and it rushed to the next room, to repeat its self flagellation against more ceiling bulbs. I turned out the lights again and it left, most likely to get lured by yet another light out there somewhere. 🙂 ]

It has taken a man of God, perhaps, to do what nobody else has been able to do since the general election season began: Get Barack Obama and John McCain together on the same stage before their party conventions later this summer.

The Rev. Rick Warren has persuaded the candidates to attend a forum at his Saddleback Church, in Lake Forest, Calif., on Aug. 16. In an interview, Mr. Warren said over the weekend that the presidential candidates would appear together for a moment but that he would interview them in succession at his megachurch.

:::snip:::

He (warren) said that both had readily agreed, perhaps reflecting how each candidate is courting the evangelical audience to whom Mr. Warren ministers.

…Rick Warren, Joel Osteen, and the business-friendly fundamentalism of the post-Christian Right era don’t set off liberal alarms the way the pulpit pounders such as John Hagee, Pat Robertson, and James Dobson do. The irony is that the agenda of this new lifestyle evangelicalism is more far-reaching than that of the traditional Christian Right: the Christian Right wanted a seat at the table; lifestyle evangelicalism wants to build the table. It wants to set the very terms in which we imagine what’s possible, and to that end it dispenses with terms that might scare off liberals. It’s big tent fundamentalism – everybody in.

But the ultimate goals remain the same. True, Osteen steers clear of abortion for the most part, and Warren, every bit as opposed to homosexuality as Jerry Falwell was, prefers to talk about AIDS relief. But both men — and the new evangelicalism as a movement — continue to preach the merger of Christianity and capitalism pioneered three quarters of a century ago. On the surface, it’s self-help; scratch, and it’s revealed as a profoundly conservative ideology that conflates church and state, scripture and currency, faith and finance…

He pulls a chain of our government’s imperialist dirty deeds from the memory hole (Think a briefer strain of Stephen Kinzer’s Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq ) and deftly weaves in the words of our “progressive” change agent extraordinare, Candidate Obama, exposing his foreign policy take as less than refreshing or reassuring or new direction.

So what makes it so sparkling, then, so newer than nouvelle cuisine, when served up by Obama?

So.

One of the participants in the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville was a man named Peter Tefft. He was outed by the Twitter group "Yes, You're Racist," which had been posting screenshots of participants in an effort to expose them. His father, Pearce Tefft, has come out and publicly denounced his white supremacist son in an open letter […]

Heather Heyer is the latest casualty in a number of deaths at the hands of white nationalists. Foreign Policy recently published an FBI and Department of Homeland Security bulletin that concluded white supremacist groups were "responsible for 49 homicides in 26 attacks from 2000 to 2016...more than any other domestic extremist movement." Despite th […]

As President Trump faces growing outrage over his response to the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, we bring you an exclusive: an interview with the great-great-grandsons of Confederate General Stonewall Jackson. At least 1,500 symbols of the Confederacy can be found in public spaces across the country. But now a number of the monu […]

In a wide ranging discussion, Nina Turner and Paul Jay focus on the role of Trump, the GOP, corporate Democrats and corporate media in perpetuating systemic racism; they also address whether Nazi's should have a right to organize public rallies

Ecuador's former president Rafael Correa is accusing recently elected president Lenin Moreno of moving the country to the right, using corruption accusations against Vice-President and Correa friend Jorge Glas as cover. TRNN's Greg Wilpert reports

BRIDGEWATER, N.J./WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump on Thursday decried the removal of monuments to the pro-slavery Civil War Confederacy, echoing white nationalists and drawing stinging rebukes from fellow Republicans in a controversy that has inflamed racial tensions.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump has stepped up his attacks on Republican senators, an approach he may regret if he is someday impeached and the Senate has to weigh charges against him stemming from an investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump has abandoned plans to create an infrastructure advisory council, the White House said on Thursday, the day after two other advisory groups were dismantled over the furor caused by Trump's remarks on white supremacists.

(Reuters) - Wisconsin's Republican-controlled state Assembly voted 59-30 on Thursday to approve a bill that paves the way for a $3 billion incentives package for a proposed liquid-crystal display plant by Taiwan's Foxconn.

Media

from Howl

I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the
hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse
O skinny legions run outside O starry
spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is
here O victory forget your underwear we're free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night

October 7 1955

"a remarkable collection of angelson one stage reading their poetry"
"I think Allen Ginsberg standing up there reading - putting himself on the line - was one of the two bravest things I've ever seen. Remember, it was '55. People had crew cuts, and they looked at you like you were misplaced cannon fodder. The country was being run by Luce publications. It was a dangerous, cold, ugly time, and it was scary. . .
In all our memories no one had been so outspoken in poetry before. We had gone beyond a point of no return. None of us wanted to go back to the grey, chill, militaristic silence, to the intellectual void - to the land without poetry - to the spiritual drabness. We wanted to make it new and we wanted to invent it and the process of it as we went into it. We wanted voice and we wanted vision."
-Michael McClure

Democrats…

Same as goddam fucking forever.
Over and over, in election year after election year, GE and MidTerms both… the Dems start to purr and preen, they stretch luxuriously - at just being TOLD they are going to win [...]
It never fails.
... in February of 2002, looking over the already joyless congressional stragglers willing to be drafted for duty… they barely dreamed, yet, it was even possible (Howard, a different person then, had not arrived to say it could be done)… but one thing was clear, we could not rely on the party to swing it. Could not. You could smell it, they would screw the deal. And I am not talking about Howard and primary issues here. By the end, that was a passing political story. Chuck it on the heap.
[...]
Upshot? The Republicans make it thru. They hold on.